i and tangled spines
by possibilist
Summary: 'Rachel's lullaby is gentle and sad and moving. She stays with you until the worst is over. It does not surprise you that it sees you through until morning.' The aftermath of Quinn's accident, told in 11 parts. Quinn-centric drabble, happy ending.


Summary: 'Rachel's lullaby is Bon Iver, which is gentle and sad and moving. She does not fall asleep, but instead stays with you until the worst is over. It does not surprise you that it sees you through until morning.' The aftermath of Quinn's accident, told in 11 parts. Quinn-centric drabble, happy ending.

AN (1): Bonjour, all of you lovely people. This is a new fandom for me, but I just have this weird love for car accidents and a not-so-weird love for Quinn and Glee itself, so I thought I'd give it a go. Obviously, I don't really know what's going to happen except for that Quinn doesn't die (phew!), so hopefully everything makes sense. Anyway, I hope you all enjoy this and please leave a review :) I love them a lot!

AN (2): Recommended listening: "The Wolves (Act I and Act II)" by Bon Iver.

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><p>i and tangled spines<p>

_(existing's tricky:but to live's a gift)_

_..._

_i. he wandered around each moment as if it were a cavernous room_

_._

You don't feel anything. You see glass and blood, lots of blood, and you smell things burning. Your phone is broken, or lost, because you can't see it anywhere and strangely you mourn the absence of such a meaningless object.

You do not realize that you are hurt. You do not think about Yale, or Glee Club, or the Cheerios, or even Rachel and Finn. You do not think of your sister, your parents, your daughter.

You're very tired, and it's difficult to make any air stay in your lungs. This scares you for a moment, so you take one hand and touch the other, weave your fingers through their perfect spaces, holding each other, your own warm cocoon.

There are geese outside of where your window used to be. You think about how they mate for life.

You're not afraid, but you recognize that this is a nice thought to have if you die.

...

_ii. _beings:_ they dissolve like the air, or water, or the cold_

.

When you wake up, you know you're in a hospital. This is because of the beeping of monitors and other white noise and this is because of the smell of hand sanitizer and weird, psuedo food and this is because you maybe sort of remember that something bad had happened to you.

You're very groggy.

Something warm is holding your hand, and you turn a little, sloppily, too much and then it hurts, but you see your sister. Frannie's asleep in the chair by your bed, all curled and uncomfortably folded. She's cut her hair since the last time you saw her — it's short now, above her ears, off her neck, with little choppy bangs. This would make you smile because you know your parents hate it and also because she's beautiful, the kind of beautiful that belongs in old Hollywood movies: sharp cheekbones, perfect skin, all slight curves and collarbones, made fuzzy by your haze of pain medications.

You groan a little in an attempt to say her name, and her eyes open. She cries a little and she squeezes your hand and says your name like a prayer and sweeps back your bangs from your forehead and then goes to get a nurse.

"I'll be back," she promises before she leaves.

When she returns, she takes your hand again and then you remember that she'd been in California, in San Fransisco, at Stanford, and now she's not, because she's _here_.

The thing that plagues your mind as you drift off in your morphine raft again, into a world of dreams and blankness, is that she's not there, and that must mean that she'd thought you important enough to come back to the place she'd always wanted so desperately to leave.

This is good and bad, you decide: you must be hurt, but she must also be brave.

...

_iii. i have brittle bones it seems, i bite my tongue and i torch my dreams_

.

Your parents allow people come to visit once you're moved out of the ICU, and they leave cards and Kurt brings a record player and some Beatles on vinyl and Puck kisses your forehead sadly and Emma and Mr. Schue leave flowers.

Rachel and Finn didn't get married. (It's a very, very small consolation.)

You pretend to be asleep when any of them are there. For some reason, they are not comforting.

Still, Rachel comes most often. She sits and chats with your sister, who is brighter and happier than you remember her in years. They are friends, you come to realise, as the doctors take you in and out of the room for tests that involve large, loud machines and also surgeries that they try to explain to you beforehand, but all you're on so many meds that all you really understand is that you need them to not _die_. Rachel and Frannie kiss your cheek each time before the nurses whisk you away, and each time you try to remember their warm lips against your skin as you fall asleep.

Four days (and three surgeries) later, you have begun to understand everything that's happened. Strangely, Blaine seems to explain — and comprehend — things the best, so you acknowledge his company. He patiently sits by your bedside in a bowtie and a cardigan and chronicles a frighteningly long list of injuries with gentle eyes.

He smiles sadly. "You have some cuts on your face. But they're small."

He tells you, "You broke your left femur. They put a rod down your leg to fix it."

He says, "You broke some of your ribs. They punctured your lung. That's what one of your surgeries was for. To fix it. To _try _to fix it," he amends quietly.

Blaine takes your hand. "You hurt your spine. Your spinal chord. It might get better."

You don't cry until then.

...

_iv. my tears are becoming a sea_

.

Seven nights after the first strange moment you'd entered this hazy world, it stops. The doctors, they decide that you need to be given less and less morphine, and, all of a sudden, all of your nerves seem to be functioning again.

This is not a good thing, not right now, because you _have _broken your leg and your ribs and you discover that a lung trying to heal from being sliced apart is what you imagine torture is aiming for. Your back, where you've learned had been cut open and reassembled, is on fire.

It's in the middle of the night when this wakes you up for the first time, the striking fear surrounding this overwhelming pain, and weirdly you think of _Harry Potter_.

You start crying, sobbing, and this only makes your ribs burn more intensely and your chest ache in the bad way.

Rachel had insisted on staying overnight, and she hears you, even though you wish she didn't. She sits up from her little cot and in the moonlight she is fabulously disheveled, her loose hair sticking up in the back, and she shuffles over to your bed, tugging a blanket around her thin shoulders and over her Amnesty International T-shirt.

"Quinn," she whispers, sitting down on the edge of your bed.

When you manage a sniffle in response, she frowns.

"It hurts," you mumble, and you try very hard and very unsuccessfully to stop crying.

She stands up and scoots you over a little in the bed, carefully and excrutiatingly — but you don't really mind all that much — and then she lays down in bed beside you.

You tuck your head into the crook between her chin and shoulder, and she kisses your temple. "I'll sing," she says, and you nod.

Her lullaby is Bon Iver, which is gentle and sad and moving. She does not fall asleep, but instead stays with you until the worst is over. It does not surprise you that it sees you through until morning.

...

_v. tiny cities made of ashes_

.

You get to take a shower — a real shower — nine days after the accident. Your sister stands in the corner of the little, blithely white-tiled bathroom, and you make languid (though very focused) movements with the help of a nurse onto the grey hard plastic seat in the corner of the shower.

The water is hot and it stings as it touches any of the brand new incisions along your skin. You see them for the first time, then, really, actually see them, held together by stitches and staples and raw and red and terrifying. The worst one is along your ribs, where they'd sliced through your chest to try to let your lung get better. You see the long line down your back in the mirror.

You ask, "Will they go away?"

Your nurse looks to Frannie, who walks over to you and then kneels in front of you, in the stream of the water. It soaks through her clothes, her sweater sticking to her skin, pressing her hair down flat against her forehead. She doesn't seem to notice, and she stands and wraps you in her arms, presses your face against her soft, thin stomach as she says, "No, Quinn."

You shake with sobs at this reassurance. It hurts in all the ways that count. She holds you together as you rip apart.

...

_vi. to sit gloriously and triumphantly in ruins may not be such a big trick_

.

Your physical therapy consists of making tiny movements with your legs, which do not seem to want to listen to the very loud shouts you try to force your brain to make at them.

It's still hard to breathe.

...

_vii. a true metaphor is a risky business, revealing of the self_

.

You go back to school in a wheelchair. You have to, because you have to finish the year and there is no reason, you tell yourself, that your brain cannot work just fine even when your legs refuse to.

It makes you feel very out of place and very disoriented, and you think about your scars and how it's astonishing and monumental and somehow infuriating that your clothes hide them so very well — _people will not know how hurt you are_.

Artie smiles at you especially big. He starts singing Lana Del Rey and its absurdity makes you laugh and you join him even though your lungs aren't quite back to normal yet. For a moment — a very small one, but it matters — you're the best kind of lost that exists.

...

_viii. life changes in the instant. in the ordinary instant_

.

Frannie left as soon as you were out of the hospital, but she calls you everyday and also texts you a lot, and you Skype on Fridays.

This time, when you answer, it's not only your sister's face that pops up on your Mac screen, but also a very attractive boy's — _man's — _face appears as well. He has dark hair and pretty blue eyes and he glances at your sister the way you want someone someday to look at you (with lust and reverence, and this is a wonderful thing).

"Quinn," Frannie says, "this is Robert."

Robert smiles. You've heard about this Robert for years now. He's studying law at Stanford, and he and your sister met when she took one poly-sci class her freshman year before she decided to study English. You know that she has loved him almost since then. There has been no one else. He has dimples.

Your sister holds up her hand to the screen. There's a very pretty ring on her finger. "He proposed," she says.

You get so excited you almost manage to stand up by yourself.

Robert adds, "She said yes."

...

_ix. _'_now we'll ride for miles!' said the boy_

.

You learn to walk again. It requires hours and hours and hours of painful physical therapy, so many that you get to know your physical therapist like a friend. It demands weekends spent with Kurt and Rachel and Mercedes and Santana and Brittany helping you hobble around everywhere. Finn and Puck and Mike and Sam always offer their arm when you shuffle through the hallway, on days where you feel brave enough to venture out without crutches — days that end in you curling up in bed and falling asleep as soon as you get home from school because that amount of physical exertion is absolutely exhausting — and they make you feel solid once again.

There are moments of pure frustration, childlike rage, tantrums, even, when you cannot get to the bathroom without your mother's help or when buying new pants takes hours because trying them on means dressing yourself, but _you do get better_.

Rachel cheers the loudest as you walk (_walk_) to accept your diploma at graduation.

It is not so much a miracle as it is a matter of intense and unfailing discipline on your part, but it is miraculous nonetheless.

...

_x. like the stars miss the sun in the morning sky_

.

You go to Yale, after tearful goodbyes and tight embraces and _I promise be happy, please be happy too _and _Thank you for everything, for being my friend_.

Rachel goes to NYATA. You talk all of the time and she is happy with Finn, who accompanies her to New York. This makes you happy, too.

You watch her perform on YouTube. She, as always, gives you chills. She is remarkable.

One day, as the last warmth of summer comes to a close, you meet a boy. It's fall and it's getting cold outside and the trees are beautiful even though they're dying. He's in your Early Shakespeare Lit class, and he rushes out after you, tugs on your hand.

"I was wondering," he says, his cheeks turning pink, "if, uh, you'd maybe want to study with me? With coffee and everything, you know," he adds.

He thinks you're smart _and _pretty, and this is an amazing thing.

"I'd like that," you say.

"I'm Evan," he tells you.

You take his hand. It's warm. "Quinn."

...

_xi. the scar meant that i was stronger than whatever it was had tried to hurt me_

.

You are resentful of your scars still, you do _hate _them, and you are uncertain of them, and, at times, you really do curse the facsimile of yourself that had been broken and cut apart and then sewed back together.

But what you want most is to be brave.

One night, in your dorm, with the moon reflecting stars off the snow outside, you take your sweater off, then your jeans. Evan looks at you like Robert looks at your sister, and he touches all of your scars with lust and reverence and when he kisses you he tastes like espresso and mint and the sweetest repose.

The next morning, when you will wake up curled against his chest, he will smooth back your hair and kiss you on the forehead, on one of the smallest scars you have, just like he's been doing it forever, as if it's the most natural thing in the world.

* * *

><p>References (and things I love):<br>title: "Holocene" by Bon Iver.  
>preface: "the trick of finding what you didn't lose" by E.E. Cummings.<br>i. "Werner" by Jo Ann Beard.  
>ii. <em>Cien Sonetos de Amor (100 Love Sonnets)<em> by Pablo Neruda.  
>iii. "Candles" by Daughter.<br>iv. _Hurry Up We're Dreaming _by M83.  
>v. <em>The Moon and Antarctica <em>by Modest Mouse.  
>vi. <em>A Gate at the Stairs <em>by Lorrie Moore.  
>vii. "Memory and Imagination" by Patricia Hampl.<br>viii. _The Year of Magical Thinking _by Joan Didion.  
>ix. "The Elder-Tree Mother" by Hans Christian Andersen.<br>x. "Summertime Sadness" by Lana Del Rey.  
>xi. <em>The Glass Castle <em>by Jeannette Walls.


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